Working full-time while raising kids: What I’ve learned about child behavior and connection
Last Tuesday, I got home at 5:47 p.m., fumbling with my keys, a half-eaten granola bar crammed in the side pocket of my work bag, the client report due Thursday digging into my lower back through the fabric. I turned the lock and opened the door, and my 7-year-old Lila was standing right in the entryway, holding my favorite coastal mug, and it was cracked clean down the middle, leaking water onto the entry rug.
I didn’t yell. My shoulders just dropped. I’d had that mug since our pre-kid trip to Maine, and I’d already spent the day troubleshooting a last-minute website change and sitting through two hours of back-to-back meetings. Before I could even open my mouth, Lila started crying, big heaving sobs that shook her whole body. She said she’d climbed the counter to get it because she knew I was thirsty after driving home, and she wanted it to be cold. My mom, who watches Lila after school, just shook her head from the kitchen. She’d asked when I’d be home every 15 minutes all afternoon, she said.
I’ve been working full-time since Lila was 4, and I’ve lost count of how many late-night scrolls I’ve done, searching “why is my kid so bad after daycare” or “do working parents kids have more behavior issues.” The guilt sticks with you, doesn’t it? I know I’m not alone in this—most parents I know work, whether it’s full-time outside the home, part-time from the kitchen table, or shifts that have us leaving before the kids wake up and getting home after they’re asleep. We all carry that unspoken question, even from ourselves: are we messing them up?
After Lila’s parent-teacher conference last fall, that guilt got louder. Her teacher pulled me aside and said Lila had been having more frequent outbursts during group work, and she often asked how many hours until it was time to go home. I left the conference with my chest tight, and called my pediatrician that afternoon, fully expecting her to tell me I needed to cut back my hours. Instead, she leaned back in her chair and said something that didn’t sound like the guilt-ridden advice I’d read online. She said kids don’t have the words to tell you they miss you. So they show you, through broken mugs and outbursts and clinging when you’re trying to leave for work. It’s not that working is bad for them. It’s that they need small, predictable ways to hold onto you when you’re gone, and to reconnect when you get home.
That’s when I started testing small changes, none of which take more than 10 minutes a day, none of which require me to quit my job or rearrange my whole schedule. The first one is the 10-minute floor rule right when I walk in the door. I leave my work bag by the entry, turn my phone face down on the counter, and sit down on the floor wherever Lila is playing. I don’t ask her a million questions about her day, I don’t start unloading the dishwasher or planning dinner. I just let her lead. If she wants to show me 12 iterations of her slime, I watch. If she wants to climb on me and wrestle, I let her. I used to think I didn’t have 10 extra minutes to waste after work, but we haven’t had a post-dinner outburst big enough to require mopping up water or patching broken mugs in three months, so the 10 minutes saves me more time than it costs.
The second thing I do is leave a tiny note or sticker in her lunch box every morning. It takes 10 seconds. I don’t write a long heartfelt letter. Most days it’s just a doodle of a silly dinosaur, or a sticker of a cat I got from the grocery store checkout, with one word: hi. Lila told me she keeps all of them in a shoebox under her bed, and she looks at the sticker if she feels sad at school. It’s such a small thing, but it gives her a little piece of connection for the day when we’re apart.
We also added five extra minutes to bedtime, where she gets to tell me one silly thing and one hard thing from her day. I don’t jump in to fix the hard thing right away. If she says her friend wouldn’t play with her at recess, I just write it down on the small whiteboard by her bed, and we talk about it over pancakes on Saturday morning, when I don’t have a deadline looming or a meeting to get to. That takes the pressure off both of us.
I still have messy weeks. Two weeks ago, I had a big deadline that required me to work late three nights in a row. My mom picked Lila up from school, we got fast food three nights in a row, and I took work calls on the couch while Lila watched movies. We skipped the 10-minute floor time most nights, and bedtime was rushed. On Thursday, Lila had an outburst because her fries were too salty, and I snapped at her for making a mess. We both apologized later, sitting on the kitchen floor, eating cold fries off the plate. It wasn’t the perfect working parent day. It just was what it was.
I don’t know how this whole thing is going to turn out. Lila still has outbursts sometimes. I still miss field trips and early release days because of work. The guilt still creeps in some nights, when I’m closing my laptop after she’s asleep. But I’ve stopped searching for the perfect answer, stopped comparing my days to the curated ones I see online. The small, predictable, low-effort connections we build every day work better than any grand gesture I used to stress about planning. Right now, that’s enough for us.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Working full-time while raising kids: What I’ve learned about child behavior and connection